Literary Larry Hama
Larry Hama deserves a medal.
The man served his country during the Vietnam War as a firearm and explosives ordnance expert for the United States Army. Upon his discharge and his return to his native New York, he became active in the city’s Asian-American community, theater, and, at the invitation of his high school classmate Ralph Reese, the comics industry, embarking upon a long and storied career that took him from Wally Wood’s studio to Neal Adams’s Continuity Studios to the offices of DC and Marvel Comics, guiding characters from Wonder Woman to Conan the Barbarian to Wolverine, building up an impressive body of work over the decades that would secure his place in the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in the summer of 2022.
My generation knows Hama best as the guiding force behind G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, the Marvel Comics series that launched in 1982 and was one of the publisher’s top sellers throughout the eighties. Much as Star Wars had drawn in new comics readers for Marvel five years prior, G.I. Joe–with an unprecedented television advertising campaign alerting toy collectors of the comic’s launch–brought thousands of new comic book readers and collectors into the fold. Mention “The Silent Issue” to any Gen X comic creator or collector and they’ll give you a knowing (silent) look as their thoughts turn to the game-changing revelation on the final page of G.I. Joe #21.
That comic alone (although you really need to put ‘Snake Eyes: The Origin’ and G.I. Joe Yearbook #2 onto the shortlist, too) establishes Hama as a master storyteller. Over the course of 155 issues (plus 28 issues of the spinoff series G.I. Joe: Special Missions and four Yearbook specials) through the mid-nineties for Marvel and nearly 150 more issues for IDW over the past twelve years, Hama juggled a cast of hundreds while managing the demands of his editors, publishers, artists, and Hasbro while crafting a compelling action-adventure saga that pit G.I. Joe against the terrorist organization Cobra, captivating an audience of millions over the course of his forty-year journey with this cast of characters.
Hama’s other major contribution to the G.I. Joe mythos transformed the entire toy industry. When Hasbro partnered with Marvel Comics so that they could launch a tie-in comic book series at the same time that their new toy line hit toy stores across the country, Hama crafted dossiers for each character, brief biographies that could fit onto a 3” x 5” card that provided a neat summary of the character’s military background, personal history, and a quote from one of the character’s colleagues (or enemies) that told you everything that you ever wanted to know about that particular soldier.
Hasbro knew that Hama had struck gold with this concept, and these dossiers were developed into collectible File Cards that would be printed on the back of each individual figure’s packaging, with kids encouraged to clip and save each character’s dossier for future reference. Kids didn’t just get a simple “Army Ranger” action figure off the rack for their $2.97, they got Stalker, file name: Lonzo R. Wilkinson, a Vietnam vet from Detroit who’s fluent in Spanish, Arabic, French, and Swahili. Silent weapons expert Quick-Kick grew up in L.A. and learned martial arts so that he could stick up for himself and protect his parents’ grocery store, a path that eventually led him to the military and a career as a Hollywood stuntman.
Roughly thirty new figures a year hit the shelves from 1982-94, including individually-packaged figures and vehicle drivers, always accompanied by a file card, always written “well above grade level,” as they say. My introduction to the G.I. Joe toys and file cards came at a friend’s third grade birthday party, where I received the Joes’ resident Mine Detector, Tripwire, as a party favor. Forty years later, I can tell you from memory that his real name is Tormod S. Skoog of Hibbing, Minnesota, grade E-4, and that he spent two years at a Zen monastery, but was ultimately expelled for spilling “every conceivable liquid.”
A quick readthrough of that file card today shows that yes, I remembered all of that information correctly, but also reveals at least a half-dozen vocabulary words that would have required seven-year-old me to consult some combination of my mother and (more likely) our dictionary so I could decipher words like “ordnance,” “conceivable,” “Zen,” “monastery,” “spiritual awakening,” and “Warsaw Pact.”
Cobra Commander’s file card had fewer new words on it (although “a man without scruples” wasn’t a common playground insult when I was in elementary school), but it introduced some high concepts like totalitarianism and asserting your authoritarian regime by taking advantage of political unrest. (In the pages of the monthly G.I. Joe comic we learn that Cobra originated as a pyramid scheme that successfully targeted the socially and economically disenfranchised members of society who felt they were owed better lives than the American way had gotten them, a much more honest portrayal of American politics than we were getting in any other kid-friendly media at the time.)
Each of these file cards–hundreds of them, over the course of the Real American Hero’s time in toy stores–is a master class in concision. Everything a reporter might need to know in order to write a brief magazine feature on any individual Joe or Cobra, everything a potential employer might ask in a second-round interview, everything a kid might ask at career day, and it’s all there, presented in an entertaining manner, with straight talk and challenging vocabulary from a writer than never once thought of talking down to his audience.
In the years since third grade, I’ve written fiction and nonfiction, book reports, books, magazine articles, museum exhibition text, application essays, letters, artist statements, and even the occasional online pop culture article, and every single time I write, I make sure I’m covering the file card basics. Is my writing straightforward and accessible? Will people relate to this content? Will the reader get everything they need to know from this piece, whether it’s a single paragraph or a 500-page history book?
Whether that’s reason enough to nominate Larry Hama for The Library of Congress Literacy Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to literacy and learning, is up for debate, but I say we give the man his due. But whether an Act of Congress acknowledges Hama’s impact on a generation of readers or not, we’ll always have The Silent Issue.
‘Nuff Said.
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